Dalit Students Waited 89 Months; Six Chief Secretaries Stayed Away

CAG found 40.75 lakh delayed scholarships. Parliament's committee summoned six states; nobody came. The Centre owes answers too.

For a Dalit child in India, a scholarship is often the difference between staying in a classroom and leaving it. It pays for fees, books and the bus fare that make school and college possible for families that have never had a spare rupee. The state promised these scholarships for exactly that reason. They are meant to be an act of repair: a small attempt to make up for centuries in which education was denied to people because of their caste.

This month, Parliament's Public Accounts Committee looked at how that promise has been kept. What it found should shame every government involved. Students waited up to 48 months for pre-matric dues and up to 89 months for post-matric dues. Some received nothing at all. Income and caste eligibility went unchecked. Payments reached people who were not entitled to them while eligible children waited. And when the committee summoned the Chief Secretaries of six states to explain, none of them turned up.

Eighty-nine months is more than seven years. A child who applied for a post-matric scholarship at the start of Class 11 could have finished school, graduated and begun looking for a job before the money arrived. That is not a delay. It is a denial.

This article sets out what the audit found, who is responsible, why the six absent officials matter, and why the Centre cannot treat this as someone else's problem.

What the auditors found

The facts begin with the Comptroller and Auditor General. In 2025, the CAG audited the Pre-Matric and Post-Matric Scholarship schemes for Scheduled Caste students. The audit covered 14 states.

According to the findings as reported:

- Delays ranged from 1 to 90 months for 40.75 lakh beneficiaries across the 14 states. - More than 3.5 lakh beneficiaries did not receive scholarships at all. - Over 5,700 cases lacked proper checks on whether the family's income met the eligibility limit. - More than 6,000 beneficiaries who were not Scheduled Caste were found to have received scholarships meant for Scheduled Caste students.

Parliament's Public Accounts Committee, chaired by Congress general secretary K C Venugopal, examined these findings on 15 October. According to Mr Venugopal's account, the audit found students waiting up to 48 months for pre-matric dues and up to 89 months for post-matric dues. The committee noted delays in releasing funds, lapses in eligibility verification and payments to ineligible beneficiaries.

These are two different failures, and both are serious. The first is the failure of delivery: money that should have reached poor Dalit students, and did not, or came years late. The second is the failure of targeting: money that went to people who should not have received it. A scheme that does both at once wastes public money and fails the people it was meant to help.

The money involved

The scale of the spending shows why the failure matters. The schemes are centrally sponsored. The Union government and the states share the cost, in a 60:40 ratio, and 90:10 for northeastern states. From 2017 to 2024, ₹52,878 crore was spent on the two schemes, of which about ₹30,234.5 crore was the Union government's share.

Those are very large sums. They are public money, raised from taxpayers, and set aside for some of the country's most disadvantaged children. That the system could produce, at the same time, waits of seven years for eligible students and payments to ineligible ones points to a basic failure of management.

The pattern is not limited to one scheme. An earlier CAG audit of pre-matric and post-matric scholarships for minority students found that at least ₹9 crore had been given to over 11,000 beneficiaries who could not be traced at the schools listed or whose schools were not operating. It found that 4,794 post-matric students across 12 states had received multiple scholarships, and that 7,883 had received more than they were entitled to. The CAG said "sole reliance" on the National Scholarship Portal for monitoring had led to irregularities. In other words, the checks were too weak, and the system that was meant to protect the money, a digital portal, could not.

Scholarships for Dalit children were designed as a bridge. The audit shows a bridge that many cannot cross and some who should not have been on it have.

The six who stayed away

The committee summoned the Chief Secretaries of six states that performed poorly. They are Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab, Odisha, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. All six had been told of the meeting days earlier. Only two sought exemption from appearing. The committee gave no relaxation to the two who asked for it, and the six did not appear.

The committee treated their absence as contempt of Parliament. Mr Venugopal has briefed Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla about their conduct and asked him to start privilege proceedings.

Several points about this are worth stating plainly.

First, a Chief Secretary is the top civil servant in a state. When Parliament's Public Accounts Committee summons one, it is exercising a power that the Constitution gives it to examine how public money was spent. Failing to appear is not a small matter. It says that the officials do not think they have to answer to Parliament. A civil servant who ignores a parliamentary committee is, in effect, saying that the public's money is no one else's business.

Second, the six states are ruled by different parties. Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh have governments led by or allied with the BJP. Karnataka has a Congress government. Punjab has an Aam Aadmi Party government. This is not a partisan failure. It is a failure of governance across the political spectrum. Anyone who tries to blame a single party is not being honest.

Third, it is a fair question to ask whether the committee's chair being from the Congress, an opposition party, affects how this is seen. It does. The BJP's supporters will say it is political. But the facts come from a CAG audit, which is an independent constitutional body, and from the officials' own absence. The facts can be checked without trusting any politician.

Punjab's example

Some of the detail from the hearing shows how basic the failures are. The committee took umbrage at the Punjab government for not paying pre-matric scholarship to 2.72 lakh students, although ₹6.14 crore was available for payment. It also told the state government that a scholarship paid after the course has ended does not keep a student in college.

The second point is the heart of the matter. A late scholarship is not a smaller scholarship. It is a different thing. If the money arrives after a student has dropped out, it cannot bring her back. The National Commission for Scheduled Castes had earlier pointed out that around two lakh SC students dropped out of college because of non-payment of dues before 2020, in Punjab alone, as was reported at the time.

Punjab also had a scandal of its own. A report in 2020 by the then additional chief secretary found alleged misappropriation of ₹55.71 crore in the post-matric scholarship scheme. The state's chief minister, Bhagwant Mann, ordered a new probe after taking power. A later the social justice department was delaying action against six officials who had been indicted. That is a reminder that the failure is not just late payment. In some cases it is corruption.

The Centre's share of the blame

It would be easy to say these are state failures. States disburse the money, verify beneficiaries and, in many cases, delay payment. And the committee has rightly called the states to account.

But the Centre cannot step aside. There are three reasons.

First, the schemes are centrally sponsored. The Centre designs them, sets the rules, pays 60% of the cost in most states, and runs the platform, the National Scholarship Portal, through which applications and payments flow. If the portal's checks are weak, as the CAG has said in its minority scholarship audit, that is a Union government responsibility.

Second, the Centre has known about this for a long time. The CAG audit is from 2025. The CAG's earlier minority scholarship findings were reported before that. If the Union Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry had acted on those findings, there would have been fewer delays to explain this month. The committee has asked the ministry to submit an action-taken report within one month. The public should ask what was done in the year before.

Third, the Centre controls the money. If funds are not reaching students because states are slow, the Centre has tools: it can set deadlines, link future grants to performance, or pay directly to students' bank accounts. It has not done so in a way that stopped delays running to 89 months.

A government that talks, as this one does, about digital delivery and direct benefit transfer owes the public an explanation of why a system built on those tools has produced this result.

Why verification matters, and why it cuts both ways

The audit's finding on eligibility has two sides.

On one side, over 6,000 non-SC beneficiaries received scholarships, and over 5,700 cases lacked proper income checks. That means public money meant for poor Dalit children went to others. Each such case takes money away from a child who needed it.

On the other side, tighter verification can become a new barrier. If a student has to produce a stack of documents, with a caste certificate and an income certificate issued by local offices that may be slow or unwilling, the process itself can shut out the poorest. We have seen this pattern in other schemes: the system tries to catch cheats and ends up excluding the honest. This is the same issue that arises with biometric checks for cooking gas.

The answer is to verify at the right time, with the right tools, and to treat delay as a failure just as serious as fraud. A system that is careful only about the second and not the first is not protecting the poor. It is protecting itself.

What students actually lose

It helps to think about what these delays mean for a real student, without inventing one.

A pre-matric scholarship supports children from Class 6 to 10, and a post-matric scholarship supports students from Class 11 onwards, up to higher education. A family that expects the money and does not get it has limited options. It can borrow from a moneylender at high interest. It can pull the child out of school. It can send the child to work. In the case of girls, the risk of early marriage rises.

A delay of 48 months for a pre-matric scholarship covers the whole of a child's middle and secondary school years. A delay of 89 months for a post-matric scholarship covers school, college and more. By the time it is paid, if it is paid, the child's education has been decided by the delay itself.

There is another effect. Families notice. If a neighbour's child waits seven years, other families conclude that applying is not worth the trouble. Enrolment drops. The scheme's numbers look worse, and the officials who run it can say that demand is falling. The failure feeds on itself.

The question of privilege

The committee's decision to seek privilege action is unusual and important. Parliamentary privilege is a power to punish contempt of the House. It has been used rarely against senior bureaucrats.

If the Speaker acts, it will be a signal that civil servants have to answer to Parliament. If he does not, the signal will be the opposite: that a summons can be ignored. The Speaker belongs to the ruling party, and the committee chair belongs to the opposition. The test is whether the Speaker treats this as a matter of institutional authority, not party politics.

There is also a question for the states. If the Chief Secretaries had a valid reason for not attending, such as a clash with another official duty, they could have asked for a new date. Two of them did ask for exemption, and the committee refused. The other four did not even ask, according to the report. If that is true, the explanation they owe is not to the opposition. It is to Parliament.

What a serious response would look like

The following steps would show that the government takes this seriously.

1. Publish state-wise pending dues. The Social Justice Ministry should release, for every state, the number of SC students owed money, the amounts owed, and the age of each pending claim. 2. Set a legal deadline. Require that scholarships be paid within a fixed period, say 60 days of a verified application, with automatic interest payable to the student for late payment. 3. Pay directly. Move to direct payment to students' bank accounts from the Centre for the central share, to avoid states holding up funds. 4. Fix the portal. Make the National Scholarship Portal show, to every applicant, the status of her application, with a record of who is holding it up. 5. Verify without excluding. Use existing government databases to verify income and caste, rather than asking poor families to chase certificates. 6. Act on fraud. Recover money paid to ineligible beneficiaries, and publish the number of cases, amounts recovered and officials penalised. 7. Answer Parliament. Make the action-taken report to the committee public within the one-month deadline, with a state-by-state response. 8. Respect the committee. The Speaker should take up the privilege matter quickly, and every state should confirm that its Chief Secretary will appear on the next date. 9. Compensate the delayed. For students who dropped out because of non-payment, create a route to re-enrol with a full scholarship.

An 89-month delay is not an accounting problem. It is a decision, repeated daily, that a Dalit child's education can wait.

What the other side says

The states would say they face real constraints. The Centre's funds arrive late, they would argue, and the 60:40 ratio puts heavy pressure on state budgets. They would say verification takes time and that they have worked to reduce backlogs. Some officials would say the committee's timing did not suit them.

The Centre would say that education and welfare are shared responsibilities, that it has built the digital systems, and that it relies on states to carry out the schemes honestly.

There is something in each of these. Funding delays are a real issue in India's federal system. But none of them explains 89 months. And none of them explains why six top officials did not appear to say so.

The bottom line

India's founders put protective discrimination in the Constitution because they knew that formal equality was not enough. Dalit children could not compete on equal terms with children who had never faced the same barriers. Scholarships were one of the ways the state promised to help.

This month's audit shows how far that promise has slipped. Forty lakh students, delays of up to seven years, hundreds of thousands who received nothing, money going to the wrong people and six top officials who did not even come to explain. The committee's work has put these facts on the record. The question now is whether anyone in government will treat them as an emergency.

A just state does not ask a Dalit child to wait for seven years for what it promised her. It also does not ask her to accept that nobody is responsible. The Centre, the six states and the Speaker all have an answer to give. The children who are waiting have waited long enough.